Christopher Rothko stands in front of a piece painted by his father Mark Rothko, at the Tate Modern, London in September 2008, in this handout image issued by the Tate Modern of London. (AP Photo/Sam Drake/Tate Modern/Ho)

Christopher Rothko stands in front of a piece painted by his father...

The man who claims to have vandalized a Mark Rothko painting at the Tate Modern in London sees his work as a cultural statement, not vandalism, he told the BBC in an on-air interview Monday.

Police are searching for Vladimir Umanets, who is suspected of applying black paint to the corner of one of Rothko's Seagram murals on Sunday, Bloomberg Businessweek reports.

Rothko's children, Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko, said they are "greatly troubled" by the incident.

Umanets told the BBC that his act is part of a movement that he and his friend created, called "yellowism."

A Facebook page devoted to yellowism offers a more detailed description, quoted from the Manifesto of Yellowism by Umanets and his partner, Marcin Lodyga. "Every piece of Yellowism is only about yellow and nothing more, therefore all pieces of Yellowism are identical in content," the information page states.

However, "the visibility of yellow is reduced to a minimum," and "interpreting Yellowism as art and being about something other than just yellow deprives Yellowism of its only purpose."

The BBC reports that Umanets compared himself to Marcel Duchamp, saying "Art allows us to take what someone's done and put a new message on it."

Houston's Menil Collection suffered its own case of vandalism this year, when a video was posted on YouTube showing a man spray-painting Pablo Picasso's "Woman in a Red Armchair" on June 13.

The vandal, later identified by police as Uriel Landeros, stenciled an image of a bullfighter killing a bull and the word "Conquista" on the painting.

Landeros told Culturemap that his act of vanalism was a political statement, adding that he thinks museums aquire artifacts by stealing from others. "It's time to stand up against the machine," he said.